Working with disgust, anger, fear, etc

This is moved from another thread where I went on a tangent. The conversation so far:

Ona said:
"incessant machine-gun wankfest" reminds me, I had been thinking I should benefit by watching some horrid movies, just to sit with something I don't like much. I could rent some movies with excessive scenes of human depravity, which I usually avoid watching "for fun" (as I don't find it fun). If one actually likes horror, war, torture and other such, one could do the same practice by watching whatever is most appalling - Disney princess movies, even.
What do you think? Worth the bother?
As you can tell, I am enormously enthusiastic about this idea, and hope someone will say "oh, that's a really great practice! do it!"

Chris replied:
That sounds like torture to me. Remind me - which practice is it that involves watching crap you don't like?


Ona said:
I'm recalling, actually, some things I've read in Buddhist texts. I think it was in a commentary on teachings of Padmasambhava, for example, where it suggested beginners (!) should spend time contemplating in a cemetery, to look at death and deeply motivate themselves to practice. Or another teaching suggested that one should look at a beautiful woman (who might inspire lust) and imagine she is a corpse, or very old. So these are examples of looking at things you like or don't like, and using that to contribute productively to your practice.
I rarely hear of anyone doing either of the above these days (though I think the latter has come up on this very forum actually)...
Even the more difficult metta practice where you wish happiness on people you dislike is recommended.
Are those so different?

Kate said:
Actually, the Vajrayana is all over 'watching stuff you don't like'--
http://buddhism-for-vampires.com/disgust-as-buddhist-practice
“It tastes like an embalmed corpse,” announced Ngakpa Trögyal, uncorking the bottle.?Ngakpa Trögyal is a specialist in the wrathful practice of Dorje Phurba—and also a hospital emergency doctor. The bottle was Ardbeg 10-Year—a Scotch whiskey I had never heard of.
'Stuff you don't like' becomes invisible once you categorize it; same is true of 'stuff you like'-- but I think opening your mind to what the latter is all about is probably MORE challenging than the former.

-- so, long story short, Ona, if you don't mind your friends being residents of 'Gone Beyond',
The more I turn this idea over in my mind, the more interesting and promising as a gate to real practice it seems. I would characterize the most powerful moments in my own history as being challenges into which I was thrown-- that I'd never have chosen given my druthers-- where seeing or acting in accordance with habit was going to mean epic failure at That Which Must Not Fail. Like parenting a child, or accompanying a parent, friend, sibling, through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
We live our lives so encased in habit as to be almost impervious to the Real; inspiration to do otherwise, even for a moment, in a small way, seems worth a response.

Ona replied:

@kate: that is a fascinating link that falls right into place with some other interesting tangents and coincidences recently. infinite bows to you for being the vehicle for several very meaningful pointers this week. thank you.

Well, pfui, Ona-- you gonna leave us hanging?

So here's the list of coincidences that are starting to pile on:

Met an old friend and dharma brother for lunch. Kali came up in conversation briefly.

Back at the hotel felt that "poking" of something wanting attention. Kali kali kali. Why? Who knows. I have only "talked" to her twice before.She is not a goddess I have a strong relationship with.

For my sit that afternoon I chanted her mantra instead of my usual just sitting. As was the case last time I spent time with her, she seems to take me into a rather strange state characterized by a sort of intense infinite crystalline clarity, as if the sound of a tuning fork were a non-audio experience. Unlike with other entities I don't tend to experience her as a vision or feel a "personality" so much as this very abstract state.

That evening at dinner had a very upsetting encounter with a disabled pregnant woman who needed medical attention but was too frightened to stay with me and wait for the ambulance, and ran away into the darkness (this was in Manhattan). I found myself in maternal outrage mode for a while. How dare the system leave someone with no capacity for self-protection and good judgment wandering the streets at that hour in the company of bad friends? The woman was very simple - not more than a child mentally.

I woke up in the night from a dream that the poor woman was giving birth on the street, covered in blood and terrified. I felt so helpless and sad, I lay in bed and prayed to Kali to have mercy on the child and the child-like mother and keep them safe. I prayed for hours, falling in and out of sleep. Every time another wave of sorrow arose I gave it to Kali.

The next morning all morning Kali's mantra kept singing through my head. I chanted it under my breath all the way back to Connecticut on the train.

That evening I did a more proper puja to her, offering food and flowers and candles and incense. I did it in my bedroom because I didn't want to leave the candles burning unattended. The same state arose.
I slept like a log and woke feeling grounded and normal for the first time in weeks. I had been having quite a strange time for some months, really, with an ongoing sense of disorientation and instability I couldn't grasp, though I recognized that the urge to grasp was noteworthy.

The next day I had two out of body experiences, which were quite bizarre. One was simply while walking through the living room, when it suddenly occurred to me that "me" and my body were not in the same location whatsoever. The second was when I woke up from a nap: I woke up, it was dark, there was nothing strange about it. Then my body woke up - it was still completely asleep - and panicked. "I" was not anywhere near my body. Slowly we reoriented into the same space, it seemed, and then I got up and went about my day. It was very strange and hard to describe. I feel rather unable to analyze things well lately. Mind doesn't incline there easily.

I had a conversation with another friend about doing practices like I mention above - sitting with unpleasant or uncomfortable things.

Later that day I had to deal with my worst phobia - I was driving and felt something on my face. I brushed it away, looked down and saw it was a huge hairy spider. I managed to shriek, flick it off my jacket, pull over, jump out of the car, grab a tissue and remove the spider from the car, note the already-dissipating adrenaline and twitching from my reaction, and calmly drive onward. This from a person who in the past would not enter a room that had been known to contain a spider in the last several days unless said spider could be located and exterminated.

Thinking on the conversation about sitting with unpleasant things, I wondered if I should go meditate in my basement or watch a movie involving cannibal spiders in order to spend more time with the reaction it inspires.

The next day two books arrived in the mail. They had been lost in the mail for months; I didn't even recall what I had ordered. One on Tantric goddesses, the other an account of a guy who did "left-hand path" tantra.

Earlier today I had a brief undefined experience that led to me shrieking, which is very unusual these days (unless spiders are involved). I couldn't tell what had happened or why "I" was a afraid. I say "I" because there was a fear response happening (shriek, panting) but I was unaware of any fear or anything to be afraid of, so it was sort of mystifying. This was just while working at my desk.

Then you posted the Vampire link.

And meanwhile I had just started writing my first work of fiction - based on years of strange spiritual experiences - which is not unrelated to what the Vampire Buddhist guy is doing with his work of fiction...

Besides at some point in the last week I emailed you Kate, to confide in some difficulties I was having, and you sent me a poem that
nailed it.

So you see, how things fall into place in strange ways that seem meaningful, as if I am being led somewhere unexpected and potentially helpful.

And meanwhile mundane complications relating to moving and such are taking care of themselves quite nicely.

Howzat?

Thoughts? (from anyone)

And finally, one of the most mystifying things I discovered while packing the house: how on earth did we end up with over thirty juice glasses and twenty wine glasses??? I keep finding box after box of spare glassware in the basement. I could have opened a restaurant.

Interesting you should find 'Kali' so focal, lately. At the moment of greatest initiatory impulsion I kept having 'fierce goddess' messages ... coming through. Although perhaps the strangest thing was that mousy little old me was up to the task of finding her words, and having a certain witchy humor. Like this--


Are You Man Enough

For Granny Goose?
Or, as the saying goes, be
careful what you pray for:
better know what you'll do
when the answer comes.
Let me put it this way:
choose your Dakini well.
All of them are armed
and dangerous-- some
with the lightning's blue
blazes in their eyes, some
with the green fuse of gardens
and keen, judicious shears
for what you won't
be needing any more.

And there's the one who will drive
her diamond nail and spin you
every witch way but loose--
whose wild, flying hair is stiff
with salt of sweat and tears,
who has the tiger's taste
for your heartblood: Her
Name is best left unsaid
until you're sure the only
lover you want is the one
whose incendiary blessing

will cost your head.

God, sorry, the whole cut & paste thing seems to produce a humongous font. Now I'm embarrassed.

[well, I edited it fixed; whew]

"will cost your head": As another friend of mine likes to joke about Kali: "chop chop!"

The first time I ever called her I was just fooling around and curious. Didn't have any idea or expectation of what might result. I spent the next three days looking like the girl in The Exorcist, massive kundalini stuff happening every time I meditated, walking around in a strange daze in between sits, constantly feeling like something else was looking out of my eyes and having spells where it felt like I was falling backwards or fainting. My teacher was torn between laughing his ass off and scolding me. I didn't call her again for a long time. If I recall I finally did a self-exorcism to regain some sense of normalcy (ritual bath with consecrated herbs and such), but the "damage" was probably done by then.

I only called her one other time before this week, just to see if with my energy more open what effect she would have compared to that rather disturbing first time. Then it was just like this week - just that crystalline tuning fork clarity. No energy stuff beyond a mild vibration or a bit of trembling here and there.

Isn't the so-called Dark Night all about facing your demons?


-cmarti

That's one way of saying it; another way might be 'turning the light around'-- facing the demons in the mirror; discovering that 'I' along with every other being, have 'nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide' from the fierce blessing in the offing.

Funny, isn't it-- this moment of time where we find ourselves: at a kind of 'super-threshhold' approaching the annual doorway between the worlds, exponentiated by the entrance into the cusp year of the Big Year [2012].

I don't have any fixed beliefs or expectations about 2012, and I'm not prone to vivid visions-- so if I'm feeling like Something Is Happening, it must be pretty obvious even to the relatively slow. Where 'slow' is helpful, is being clear that whatever it is, 'it's not about me.'

I liked a Christian mystic's take on it (badly restated in my own fumbling words and source forgotten): the "dark nights" are actually the moments when your practice has deepened, but you haven't caught up. For example you might be used to experiencing "God" or some other aspect of practice in a certain way, but all of a sudden it isn't like that anymore. It's gone deeper. But you keep trying to hang on to the familiar form of experience, and it feels to you like you have lost touch with God (or other aspects of your practice). You flail and struggle and grope and grieve and are afraid - what am I doing wrong, why am I abandoned, what happened to my meditation? And then slowly the insights catch up with reality, and you start to see what you were missing, and you feel re-stabilized and comfortable and connected again.

My dark night phases have fairly rarely involved actual demons, though occasionally fears and such manifested as nightmares or scary visions. More often more just emotional turmoil - weeping and gnashing of teeth stuff and a lot of physical discomfort.

Something Kate said the other day was useful - that the best way to practice during dark nights is to be like a (wounded/sick) patient rather than seeker. They do seem best faced with a lot of surrender practice, to counterbalance the natural tendency to flail around immersed in grasping and aversion.

What I meant to ask re: Chris' question above: was there a bigger question there? Such as "why bother dealing with disgust, fear, etc outside of the times it naturally arises (dark night periods)?"

What about facing that guy in the movie's demons? ;D

some days offer plenty of stuff to practice with.

Hey, anything we can do to blow your mind...

Nice.